alt Hacker NewsWhile Stross is currently a neo-Luddite who doesn't believe in the Singularity, his book Accelerando is probably the best work of Singularitarian fiction ever written. It was written in the 2000s, starts in the 2010s, and covers the various decades of this century. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know how weird this century will be. It's also available for free online. [1]
It's one of my favorite books and the main reason I'm e/acc and many other pro-AI people love it because we view it as utopian sci-fi rather than the dystopian world Stross invented. This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme [2] in action.
1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
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1) Having met Stross, and briefly spoken to him way back when, he never actually believed in the singularity as a possible future.
2) Turns out it was the sci-fi author who was wrong all along! Fascinating to see someone confidently citing a meme, while actively evidencing the fallacy it exposes.
You think accelerando is utopian sci fi!? Which characters perspective are you identifying with so strongly? They all have pretty severe societal challenges that makes me surprised to see the word Utopia.
> a neo-Luddite who doesn't believe in the Singularity
You’ve lost the plot. There is no singularity, your machine-god is not coming to save you.
Calling people Luddites for not believing in the Singularity is like calling people communists for supporting affordable health care.
> In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-sh...
Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.
He had already disappointed me in 2011 with this post
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality...
Belief in the Singularity and belief in God strike me as extremely similar.
Both, I think, are extremely interesting ideas where very few theories, e.g. pro, anti, or anywhere in between, can be written off as ridiculous -- probably due to a lot of ambiguity and difficulty in defining proof.
For me, I find the Singularity very implausible due to the fact that we talk about "general intelligence" quite a bit, and the more we do, I'm finding that I don't think it exists. There are a set of low-level basic skills that I think -- if you don't have, you're not intelligent. And then there are higher level skills that vary wildly.
So, will we make AIs that can say and do very clever and amazing things; yes, this is happening. Will they be, like ascendant, or something? I would say -- yes, but perhaps not in the way we think? Like, humans made "The Bible." And that's obviously a big huge, impactful, maybe superhuman thing. But feels different from this idea of a "Singularity."
> This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme in action.
At least the author seems to think[1] it is one, if in not so many words:
> And don't ever let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163630